


Tramontane

by recrudescence



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-22
Updated: 2011-04-22
Packaged: 2017-10-18 12:32:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/188918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/recrudescence/pseuds/recrudescence
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are things for which Arthur’s life doesn’t allow, things that Eames makes him forget each time the two of them end up devouring dreams and each other when work causes them to meet. He can’t keep traversing the world like this, occasionally crossing paths with this dangerous, unreliable, sharp-witted man who plays hopscotch with other people’s identities and plucks grenades from his pockets like they’re candy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tramontane

**Author's Note:**

> Written for i_reversebang to accompany katy_romance's [art](http://i.imgur.com/YxIpx.jpg). Many, many thanks to sevenswells for being supportive and French-savvy! Translations are in mouseover.

“I need time,” he tells Eames.

This is after Arthur accosts Eames in the airport, after they’ve worked their way through the baggage claim and strolled straight past a sleek-suited pillar of a man holding a sign bearing Fischer’s name. This is after they spend a stunned, silent taxi ride to Arthur’s hotel and Eames sends him a text message even though they’re sitting beside each other, thigh to thigh.

 _did we really_

And Arthur contemplates a thousand unrelated replies and responds.

 _yes, we did_

Fischer’s been successfully taken down. Saito’s been satisfied. Cobb’s gotten what he wants. Now it’s his turn.

He says it after all of this, after they’ve taken phenomenal advantage of two bottles of Dom Perignon—and the walls and door and bed in Arthur’s room—and the sheets are spilling onto the floor.

Eames doesn’t ask him why or how much or what’s come over him. Eames’s hand is broad and cool against the sticky skin of Arthur’s back, heavy in a sleepy sort of way. Almost possessive, almost domestic. Arthur dozes in spite of himself and when he wakes up Eames is stroking along his side, innocuously.

It would be alarming how well someone like Eames can do innocuous, if Arthur were easily alarmed.

There are things for which Arthur’s life doesn’t allow, things that Eames makes him forget each time the two of them end up devouring dreams and each other when work causes them to meet. He can’t keep traversing the world like this, occasionally crossing paths with this dangerous, unreliable, sharp-witted man who plays hopscotch with other people’s identities and plucks grenades from his pockets like they’re candy.

“Tell me when you don’t need any more.” Eames kisses him and Arthur doesn’t answer.

\---

He needs time. Eames gives it to him.

It feels so strange to be using his passport again, the one with his actual surname, even now that Cobb’s innocence has been verified. Arthur isn’t used to being himself anymore, not on paper, and it chafes at him somehow. Dreamsharing isn’t some kind of hobby a person can pick up and set aside as they please. It never has been.

At the last minute, he uses an alias anyway.

Cobb isn’t the only one with family in France. Arthur’s dual citizenship has always worked to his advantage, as has the fact that his first exposure to PASIV technology occurred at too young an age for him to be anything but awed by it. A little older, a little more prudent, and he might have found it daunting or frightening, the way most sensible people did. His mother was always saying that sensibility was obviously a recessive gene in their family.

She was generally referring to her brother, but she would always look at Arthur like she was expecting something.

He swaps out his phone number and his identification and takes a new history for himself and knows he should be happy. Settled. Not running. Not being fucking _shot_ at. Arthur’s interpersonal skills have never been his best.

His passport, the real one, with his actual surname, he keeps tucked away.

\---

The house is in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, near Avignon and Nîmes but still somehow a world apart. Referring to it as a villa sounds too pretentious and he doesn’t want pretention at this point.

Arthur makes an art of keeping to himself even though it seems odd to be so sedentary, not having to worry about puddle-jumping through different countries because Cobb could be caught at any time.

Clouds coat the sky like swirls of oil paint there, each on the other, tropospheric impasto, and when he lies on the terrace and watches them long enough it makes him ache for reasons he doesn’t understand. He stares and sips sauternes until his vision doubles and he feels like he should be somewhere else and he can practically hear Eames laughing at him. It’s reminiscent of a Dramamine trip, when he took some while they were dreaming on a train for the first time and didn’t realize how horribly it would interact with Somnacin. He’d woken up with his head pounding, cursing trains, and Cobb had sighed and patted his shoulder and seemed to age a decade before his eyes.

He speaks to Cobb after a few days and doesn’t answer right away when he asks if Arthur will be visiting soon. He talks about the weather and the news and how the kids are doing as well as can be expected, still adapting to having a father again after losing both parents. They don’t mention work at all. Arthur can hear Philippa in the background demanding to know who Cobb is talking to.

Cobb, dutiful father and shrewd negotiator, tells her to go help James make a volcano.

This sounds perilous to Arthur, but it seems to work.

When Cobb apologies for the interruption, there’s amusement in his voice and Arthur can tell without even seeing him that he has more sun in his hair and more laughter around his eyes.

Arthur says, eventually, that he isn’t ready to leave.

He learns it, the sun-faded shutters and cobbled streets, the storefronts spilling out scents of lavender and newly baked bread, the way the Wednesday market is overrun by tourists at certain times, especially now that the weather is warming up. Sometimes the wind rips down between the mountains and howls like a banshee, but it’s small and uncomplicated here and he can lose himself as if it’s a much larger place than it is, this town that inspired Van Gogh to paint Starry Night and contains a street named for Nostradamus.

Prophecy and insanity and beauty and a village sculpted by dreams. He thinks he can understand why his uncle chose it.

The house itself is peaceful and airy and too empty for one person, but it’s his to do with as he pleases. Arthur becomes someone solitary and comfortable and nearly normal, albeit someone who still keeps weaponry in his nightstand and spends too much time wondering what to become next, since being on vacation can’t last forever.

It should feel like coming home. It doesn’t.

\---

There are moments when he imagines calling Eames. These always occur at the worst possible times.

He thinks Eames is back in England, though he doesn’t know for sure and isn’t about to ask Cobb. If Cobb’s been traitorous enough to pass his new contact information to Eames, Eames never uses it.

When he does decide to phone Eames, he doesn’t bother to cover his tracks. It’s the middle of the night and Arthur is writhing into the sheets and his own hand and the most recent results of some much-needed online shopping. It’s been two fucking hours and he still feels the phantom pressure of lips on his nape, full and curved and teasing, and the shape of two strong hands curving around his hips.

It’s also past three in the morning and if Eames is in England he might not take too kindly to a phone call. Arthur sends a text instead, before he can stop himself.

When he receives a response from Eames the next day, it’s an incomprehensible mishmash of letters, numbers, and punctuation. Puzzled, Arthur calls him back.

“You.” Eames sounds accusatory.

“Good morning,” Arthur replies dryly. “Did you drop your phone?”

“Drop my—no. That, Arthur, was my honest, visceral reaction to your message.”

“Right. That.” He coughs. “I didn’t want to wake you up. I know you like your sleep.”

“Next time?” Eames says, with conviction. “Call me anyway.”

Arthur knows he should snort and make an acerbic remark and hang up, but he can’t.

“I’m not complaining,” Eames adds diffidently, “but where in the world did that come from?”

Arthur can’t begin to say, not in any way that would sound coherent. It’s appalling, how easily Eames can rob him of words.

He sighs, shrugs even though Eames can’t see it, and answers as flippantly as he can. “Haven’t been getting out much here. I had to take some kind of action.” He doesn’t ask if Eames has slept around since they parted ways. He doesn’t want to hear.

“You realize I’m going to be thinking of it all day,” Eames says, a hint of gravel in his tone.

Today, the clouds are smeared from horizon to horizon in a thick sheet of white, like one solid sweep of an enormous palette knife. Arthur swallows and stares and sees too many images on the pale canvas of sky. He goes back inside. “I live to entertain you, didn’t you know? Have you been working lately?”

Eames laughs, dark and delighted. “Oh, no, you’re not off the hook just yet, darling.” His voice is liquid, decadent, honey in a cupped hand. When he whispers _tell me_ , Arthur can practically lick the words into his mouth.

And Arthur tells. He sits at his kitchen table and tells Eames how he thought of buying a vibrator, a plug, any kind of toy to keep himself open, but didn’t think he could wear one without fucking down onto it and jerking off and generally driving himself to distraction. He tells how he finally caved and tried it out anyway, alone at night, but just ended up rutting into the sheets and coming over and over and it still didn’t give him enough, just as he feared, and fuck, it’s stupid, he’s said so much and none of it has any substance and he shouldn’t ever have called him. He shouldn’t ever have gotten himself into this.

His voice trails off, but Eames has no trouble taking over. “I can imagine you, you know.”

Arthur recoils inwardly. He doesn’t want Eames imagining him. Eames is very, very good at imagining. If this were a dream, Arthur would be fumbling for a gun and shooting himself awake like a panicked rookie.

He can hear the languor of Eames’s breathing. Slow and easy and uninhibited, like he thinks nothing of saying the things he says, the things that have Arthur’s free hand clenching over his thigh. “You’d be spread out on your stomach, pale in the moonlight, thrusting your hips against the bed, and you’d have your legs parted enough to show the shadow of a plug up between your arse. Your hands would be jerking at the covers and your back would be arching,” and yes, he’s not far off at all even though he can’t possibly know that Arthur came that way, sweat-dappled and with Eames’s name yearning to slip from his tongue. How he pulled it out and fingered himself, three of them, rough and flexing and buried inside him.

“I would’ve held you open and taken it out of you then,” Eames’s words ease against his ear with the surety of a long, slow kiss, “maybe with my teeth, and fucked you so full you were crying for me. Until you screamed.”

Arthur wants to resent that on principle, but he listens anyway. Storytelling is an art and Eames is nothing if not an artist. “I’m not that noisy,” he says, going for casual.

“No,” Eames agrees, “but I think you could be. For me.” There’s silence and Arthur’s pulse hammers up his throat and then he can hear the smile in Eames’s words. “If I’m lucky, of course.”

He hangs up, thinks of throwing the phone down the garbage disposal.

\---

Eames could track him down at any time. He doesn’t. It’s actually rather gentlemanly of him. Arthur tries not to approve of that too much, for his own good.

“What is this place you’re staying in, if I can ask?” says Eames. Arthur phones him every few weeks, turning into every few days, and Eames is always there no matter what time it is. It would be so simple for Arthur to reply that, no, he can’t ask, he doesn’t get to know these things, not just yet.

"This uncle of mine,” he hears himself saying slowly, “he did all right for himself.”

When Eames laughs, Arthur’s blood hurtles southward. “You have a rich uncle? Is this suddenly _Fiddler on the Roof_? I don’t judge you for not having a dowry, darling.” That’s always Eames’s way, joking with things that shouldn’t be joked about. It bothers Arthur sometimes, how much he’s gotten used to.

“Had. He left me this.”

He doesn’t offer any information besides that. Eames has no use for hearing how this is the place said uncle planned to live when he retired, but never had the chance because too many years of lucid dreaming only gave him a short time to live. Compounds for dreamsharing were so unreliable when the concept was still new and unedited. It was a brain tumor and he died in a Paris hospital when Arthur was still serving in Iraq, feeding his adrenaline cravings the best way he knew how and worrying his mother sick. He’d been twenty and absolutely terrified of ending up chained to a desk job for the rest of his life.

 _Arthur’s going to need someplace to come back to once he figures out who he wants to be_. Those had been the words from the will. Arthur still hasn’t figured out anything, but before they say goodbye he hears himself inviting Eames over.

Not to a hotel room, not to someplace being borrowed or stolen from someone else, but someplace that’s genuinely his. He’s known Eames for nearly four years, fucked him off and on for nearly three of those, and it still seems like too much. There’s a very good chance that Eames is going to come to him and Arthur wants to run away.

“I’d been thinking of heading off to Mombasa again,” Eames muses, “but Yusuf keeps trying to discourage me. Says I’m a risk and he doesn’t want his funds to deplete because I’m around. How insulting is that?” This time when he laughs, it subsides into a sigh. “But I’d rather see you. You know that. Of course you know that.”

“I,” says Arthur. “I’ll text you.”

He sends Eames the address. He tries not to think of what to expect.

\---

He doesn’t count on Eames showing up in a fucking suit. Charcoal-gray. Rumpled. Hair a little limp, lips a little chapped. Stunning.

“You look like you’ve made yourself at home here,” says Eames. He’s smiling. Arthur can barely look at him. If he looks, he’ll stare; if he stares, he won’t be able to speak.

“You look,” _beautiful, unreal, overwhelming_ , “like you could use a drink.”

And he hauls Eames into town for dinner because he doesn’t trust himself alone with him in private. He doesn’t allow time for a handshake, let alone anything more. Arthur pretends he doesn’t notice, even though his hands ache to strip away every stitch of Eames’s suit and really, truly _touch_.

“You’re going to have to explain all this to me,” Eames announces, and Arthur is ready to laugh uproariously and confess he can’t explain anything when it comes to Eames and that’s what makes him useless. That’s what makes him weak.

Then he realizes Eames is blinking down at the menu, bewildered as a kitten trying to catch a fly on the wrong side of a window.

Arthur frowns. “You don’t know any French?”

The exasperated look Eames gives him is both well-deserved and incendiary. “Would I be having this problem if I did?”

“You never seemed to have a problem when we were in Paris.”

“That’s because the extent of my knowledge is directing taxi drivers and ordering coffee, both essentials in any country.” He smiles again and Arthur’s toes curl inside his loafers. “You, on the other hand, I heard you all the time. On the phone, on the street, when you met with Ariadne’s professors, and I’d had no idea. I can do an accent without knowing the language itself, but everything else? I fake it, like most things.”

Arthur cocks his head. “Really.”

“ _Most_ things, you ingrate,” Eames repeats, cutting into his roll. “Not all. Now tell me what to order.”

Selfishly, Arthur steers him towards oysters because watching Eames’s eyes flutter closed when he swallows is the most dazzling kind of torment. The restaurant they’re in is sparsely populated, since it’s technically too early for dinner, but that just means fewer people around to be aghast in the event Arthur does something rash like flinging himself across the table. It actually does cross his mind a time or two.

And for a little while, they excel at acting as if Eames doesn’t have a foot between Arthur’s ankles and Arthur hasn’t been making a recluse of himself since the last time they met. Eames mentions how he lent a hand with some work in Southampton and how disappointing it was being hired for what amounted to tapping into a series of subconscious conference calls. Then he dabs his lips and asks, “Where did you learn?”

Arthur doesn’t look up from his plate. “My mother’s French. We moved stateside when I was a kid to be closer to my dad’s side of the family.”

“I had no idea.” Eames actually sounds surprised.

“It’s not common knowledge. It’s not even _un_ common knowledge.” His conscience insists that this still doesn’t mean he should be narrating his background to just anyone. He takes a breath and it practically scrapes from his lungs. “My uncle. He was one of the original conductors of the PASIV trials when the French military started developing them.”

Eames’s eyebrows shoot towards his scalp. “Fuck.”

“That’s how I got to know Cobb. He was an architecture student they recruited to help develop the technology.”

“One of the original Ariadnes,” Eames murmurs.

Arthur tries to sound nonchalant, never mind that he hasn’t ever actually _told_ anyone these things and Eames is sitting less than a meter away looking vaguely pornographic each time he swallows. “I found out by accident. I met Mal when I was doing a summer exchange program. And one day she was telling me that her father raved about the work my uncle was doing with him. I wouldn’t stop bothering her until she swore me to secrecy and explained it to me.”

“Your background checks turned up absolute shit on this.” Eames sounds a little put out, which has a surge of lightheadedness cajoling Arthur’s lips upward as if he’s downed an entire bottle of wine as opposed to a glass and a half.

“I’m careful. Besides, background checks don’t cover things like that.” He sits back in his chair, unable to completely wipe the smirk from his face. “But I’m flattered, Mr. Eames, that you do your homework before you pick your colleagues.”

“And that was it, wasn’t it?” Eames is surveying him, asking when he must already know the answer. “You couldn’t walk away once you knew.”

It’s the same story every time, with everyone who’s ever fallen into the world of dreams. As far as Arthur’s concerned, that’s always how it is. “My family didn’t plan on having a dynasty of dreamers or anything like that, but my uncle was one of the best and I couldn’t just move on without exploring that.” Setting down his fork, he shakes his head slightly when their waiter appears on the periphery. “They hadn’t perfected the compounds. Some of the side effects caused him to die prematurely. I was in the army when it happened and I let myself get into special ops anyway so I could find out more.”

“A dynasty of dreamers,” Eames repeats, so quietly Arthur has to lean in to hear him. The familiar waft of Eames’s aftershave makes his jaw tighten. “You really were born for this, weren’t you?”

Arthur snorts. “I have no fucking idea what I was born for.”

“You have plenty of time to learn,” says Eames, sounding far more certain than Arthur is. “I can guarantee you that much.” And he kisses him, so quickly Arthur nearly doesn’t realize he’s done it.

“Are you going to take me home now?” There’s a note to Eames’s voice Arthur hasn’t heard before. “I don’t think I can behave myself for much longer.” Then he actually takes Arthur’s hand, lightly enough for Arthur to pull it away.

He doesn’t. He’s pulled away enough. It helps that there’s still a table between them or else he might not trust himself.

The ridges of Eames’s knuckles are crooked, as if the fingers were broken some time ago and reset a little unevenly. Arthur entertains thoughts of asking Eames how and when, but doesn’t dare think Eames might actually tell him. It isn’t important anyway, not with Eames watching him with unblinking eyes and his question suspended delicately between them.

Instead, Arthur touches his tie. Garnet-hued, smooth under his fingers, and when he slants their mouths together Eames tastes of dry red wine. “Yes.” He does it again, after doing a quick sweep of the restaurant to make sure the waiter isn’t about to come bustling over. “And when I do,” Arthur tells him, “I want you to tie me.”

“Sweetheart, I—”

Fucking pet names. Arthur sighs. “We’ve been through this. I’m not _sweet_. And I want you to.”

Eames says nothing, but his gaze is contemplative when he rubs his thumbs over the thin-skinned insides of Arthur’s wrists. And even if the knots are shit and Arthur could free himself if he wanted to, he’ll let Eames bind his hands and pretend he can’t, for both of their sakes. If he isn’t held down, he’ll run.

\---

It starts with Eames’s suit being shed in pieces all down the hallway and up the stairs. Arthur’s sure he must contribute to that, but he can’t make head or tail of how since Eames has him pressed against the wall, knocking pictures askew, and he’s being kissed hard and deep. All he can do is let his eyes slide closed and his hands grip at Eames’s hips, his hair, anything to pull him closer.

Eames works a hand up his shirt, making a sound of dismay when Arthur twists away to pick up the tie from where it’s been lying like a red gash in the floorboards. “Do you still—?”

Arthur just passes it to him, nodding, and slips the belt from his pants.

Eames helps, stripping him and laying him down and just _staying_ there, skin on bare skin, once he’s wrapped the tie around Arthur’s wrists and secured them to the headboard. “If you don’t like it,” his fingers graze over Arthur’s ribs, making his breath catch, “say so anytime and I’ll take it off. I didn’t come here to traumatize you.”

Arthur snorts, because if anything were to traumatize him it wouldn’t be a few feet of strategically applied silk. But Eames is kissing his mouth and stroking his hair and then sliding down to suck him, wet and slow, and Arthur finds himself without words. Eames is attentive, he always is, used to learning bodies as a matter of course, and that unnerves Arthur almost as much as it delights him.

“What are you so worried about?” Eames asks, voice vibrating through Arthur’s body, thumb glancing over the furrow that has to be deepening between his eyebrows.

Arthur winces, hating the idea that he might still just be another body for Eames to learn, that he just spilled his family history to him and feels like he might as well have opened a vein and told Eames to suck him dry. “ _Je me fais du souci à propos de tout quand c'est toi que ça implique. Voilà le problème_ ,” he answers truthfully, ignoring the perplexed look on Eames’s face. Then, demanding, “Did you fuck anyone else?”

Eames is sighing, hushing him with kisses, mapping every part of his body but his cock. “I didn’t know if I’d hear from you within a week or within a year,” he says finally.

It’s a response that makes perfect sense, but Arthur hates it anyway.

“What have you been doing out here all alone?” Eames murmurs, lips soft against the inside of Arthur’s knee. “Bird-watching? Crocheting?” Arthur squirms, silk biting into his wrists and Eames’s taunts biting into his sanity.

“Trying a few new things, like resting.” He doesn’t mention that he’s been failing egregiously at it. Judging by the hum of laughter at his ear, Eames has already figured as much.

“Speaking of new things, did it satisfy?” Those hands urge his legs open still more and Arthur cedes to them. “Your toy?”

“Yes.” Eames bites lightly, a swift dart of teeth at the side of Arthur’s neck, and he twists. “No.”

Instead of the smug smile Arthur expects, Eames seems almost pensive. “Do you miss it?” His mouth works its way down to the join of Arthur’s thigh, tongue lapping a slow trail back to the base of his still-damp cock. Arthur tries not to buck. “I think you do,” Eames says, almost a croon. “I think you miss getting fucked good and hard and trying not to limp your way into work the next day. Your arse has probably been weeping for it.”

Arthur makes a face. “Okay, stop. That’s disgusting.”

When Eames laughs and ducks to lick him again, the ripple of ink and shadows across his shoulders is spellbinding. “My apologies. But I do think it kills you, going without. Silicone just isn’t the same.” He bends, sucks, and Arthur is breathless by the time he pauses again. “And I think you thought of it. Of me.”

 _All the time. All the fucking time_. He arches. “Maybe I was too busy crocheting.”

Eames looks at him, slipping a hand up to where Arthur’s are held in place and squeezing briefly. “It’s all right. I thought of you, too.” Then he moves downward, the tip of his littlest finger dipping into his navel, teeth nipping at the edges of it, and sets to work sucking him until he’s soaking wet and flushed deep pink and Arthur doesn’t have to answer and he’s so fucking glad.

It’s been too long and Eames is too much; he won’t be able to last. It doesn’t take more than a minute or two before Arthur’s swallowing his pride as Eames swallows him down. “Stop-- _fuck_. Need some time, just need a minute.” He’s tugging, struggling to wrest his hands free even though it’s so much safer if he doesn’t. Eames makes him forget these things. “Please…I don’t want to come yet.”

And Eames does stop, petting him, pondering aloud, “I wonder if you’d let me rim you like this, eat you out and then ride down onto your sweet little cock and let you fuck me dry…I usually don’t, but I could.”

The _for you_ this time is unspoken and Arthur’s too far gone to be grateful, just as he’s too far gone to take him to task for inappropriate use of the word “little.” Then Eames is asking where he keeps his lube and that, _that_ he can answer.

“’s in the bathroom, first drawer down. If you take a picture of me, I’ll murder you.”

It isn’t human, the way Eames can engulf him and devastate him and still have him gagging for more.

The look of amusement on Eames’s face when he returns, on the other hand, is very human. “Should I ask why you keep a nine millimeter in the same drawer as your lube?”

“Doesn’t everyone?”

Eames stares fondly down at him. “You don’t have a clue what to do with yourself now that Cobb’s in the clear.”

Arthur doesn’t reply to that. “Are you going to fuck me or not?”

“Patience. No one since me, you said, isn’t that right? No one’s had you here,” and he’s touching him, Arthur’s mouth dropping half open as a wet fingertip presses at him without entering, “and that’s tragic. Would you like me to come in you?”

Arthur flushes. Everywhere. “I have no idea where you’ve been.”

“There’s nothing else to know.” Eames is smiling, like he’s just pulled an ace from his sleeve. “Sasha, the one who does point for Arellano’s lot sometimes, I let him get a hand down my pants while we were pissed on cheap vodka and he happened to be in the area, but that’s all. I promise you, that’s all.”

He takes Arthur’s face in his hands, serious. Arthur can feel the thick press of his cock against his stomach and, _fuck_ , it’s insane, but that alone has him ready to believe whatever Eames tells him. “I wouldn’t ever botch this up. You can’t think I’d do anything that might keep me from coming inside you again and again, can you?”

“You sound,” Arthur says, “like a particularly raunchy romance novel.” But he’s grinning and kissing him back, swearing when Eames takes a nipple between two fingers and twists.

“I’m not the one who speaks fucking French. It’s the language of love, so you must know how to say _something_ raunchy in it. Let’s hear you.”

“You’re a bastard,” Arthur informs him. _“Tu n'es vraiment qu'un sale con et tu m'as tellement manqué que c'en est ridicule._ ”

“That,” Eames says, “is a promising start.”

He makes it a personal mission, goading Arthur into madness with his mouth and hands and existence, all while uttering small half-muffled noises like he’s consuming something extraordinarily delicious. Arthur arches and curses and gasps for it, still tied to the bed in a house that still doesn’t feel like his own, still trying to occupy someone else’s world like he can actually _live_ in it. He doesn’t know what he was he was thinking, letting Eames come here, and he doesn’t want to know what that says about him.

“Fuck. _Fuck_.”

Eames has a hand cradling his head, fingers through his hair, and Arthur is slick everywhere with sweat, lips parted, and Eames is still slowly, relentlessly kissing up his neck, smearing the burn of his chin and cheeks over the sensitive skin. “That’s the best you can do? You’re _fluent_ , darling, it’s in your _blood_ , now prove it. At least give me a _merde_ to work with.” The scratch of facial hair goes burning over Arthur’s chest, jaw, neck, and he tilts his head back to feel it on as much skin as possible and those fingers press into him, stretching and rubbing, and all the while he’s hearing Eames’s murmuring over the throb of his pulse in his temples. “So lovely, take it for me, just like that…”

 _Oh my God_. Arthur keeps saying it. He loses track of what language he uses.

“I thought you were so good with words, too,” Eames clucks at him, and Arthur hurls expletives at him in French and tells him he’s perfect and infuriating and making him doubt everything.

“Specificity,” Eames chides him, and slips in a third finger.

“Rougher,” Arthur groans, and Eames just keeps going so slowly, fingering him until Arthur’s shame falls by the wayside and he’s asking for his cock. “Want it, in my mouth, then my ass, just fucking _let_ me,” and Eames’s eyes flutter and he leans down to slick his tongue into Arthur’s mouth, hungry for it.

Eames doesn’t let him lick right away, drawing back just to watch Arthur open his mouth and strain for it-- _like a whore_ , Arthur’s mind supplies, but he’s past caring.

“Say that in French,” Eames tells him, and Arthur rolls his eyes and twists against the tie, but he does it anyway. Eames’s hand is wide and warm against his cheek. “Good boy. You never breathe a word about what you want unless someone drags it out of you.”

There are so many rebuttals Arthur could make to that, but then Eames guides his cock between his lips and Arthur can’t do anything but moan around him and suck him down like he’s been dying for it.

It doesn’t last long; he’s been finger-fucked open and they’re both impatient and gasping for it when Eames sits back on his heels and slicks his cock. Then Eames reaches up and unties him.

“I want your hands free for this,” he says simply when Arthur starts to protest.

“What’re you—”

Eames just holds him closer than is comfortable and looks at him with inscrutable eyes. “Arthur, listen to me. I don’t want to have to hold you down to keep you in place.” And he draws Arthur up into his lap with Arthur’s legs cradling his hips and Eames’s big hands swallowing up his back and then Eames’s cock is pushing into him, hot and huge and opening him up so perfectly Arthur can’t keep from crying out and digging his nails into Eames’s shoulders.

When Eames begins to move, Arthur braces an arm on the mattress behind him and jerks himself off as best he can without losing his balance. Then Eames guides him onto his back and keeps fucking him and Arthur’s legs are in the air and his fist is tight around his cock and he knows he’s uttering sounds that should be embarrassing, but Eames is kissing him everywhere, mouth gentle even as he’s jarring him up towards the headboard. Still urging him on with strained entreaties— _need to hear you, sweetheart, go on, keep talking for me_ — all the while.

And Arthur does. Arthur throws back his head and begs for him. _“Continue. J'aime te sentir, j'aime quand tu es comme ça, ne t'arrête jamais._ ”

He spills out confessions Eames can’t comprehend a word of, which is so liberating, admitting that he’s missed him and he feels so good like this. And other things, that the house is enormous around him and he rattles around in it like a marble in a bowl, that he feels like an idiot for requesting time to himself at all. “ _Je n'avais rien prévu de tout ça, mais je ne pouvais m'empêcher de penser à toi et ça, ce n'était pas acceptable. Ne perds pas tout espoir en moi. Je ne peux rien te promettre, mais je peux essayer de faire mieux._ ”

He says it again just before he comes. _Je peux essayer de faire mieux_.

Eames spends so much of his life filling his mouth with other people’s words. He deserves to have someone say the right thing to him in return, even if he doesn’t understand it.

\---

It could be hours they spend lying there, Arthur letting Eames take his tongue, his fingers, into his mouth and suck at them. Arthur thinks he dozes off, still wet and sensitive and sprawled against him, letting him touch wherever he likes. He hisses when a finger slips back into him, but his body pulls into a traitorous arc anyway. Eames’s lips curve against his nape and Arthur’s fingers tangle in the sheets.

Not speaking, only mouths and hands and groans and Arthur, splayed on his back and wanting him all over again because Eames always knew him better than he should. He barely feels like himself anymore, fucked wide and sore and slick for Eames to ease fingers up inside and play with him. Arthur turns onto his stomach to let him keep at it until he’s on the edge of losing himself once more and the memory-foam mattress probably has a permanent impression of his face. Eames still doesn’t stop and it feels so good, too good, but Arthur can’t bring himself to snap at him or try to pull the brakes.

Then Eames draws a thumb down between his cheeks, gliding it lower and _in_. Arthur is sweating and shaking but his body obliges, greedily taking it deeper, then the other. Eames holds him open and lightly blows on the exposed little opening instead of actually fucking him, and Arthur can’t fucking take it and actually, literally _sobs_ before he can catch himself. Eames just kisses his back and works his thumbs in him, stretching him open. And then he talks, fragments of praise and concern that scald over Arthur’s nerves. “Fuck, you’re so wet, so red; haven’t been too rough on you, have I? Let’s see you, that’s right...”

And Arthur can feel lube and come slipping out of him because Eames is keeping him open and there’s nothing _in_ him and he’s so, so close, trying to clench himself closed as Eames draws his thumbs apart just a bit wider. He knows Eames is watching it escaping down his thighs, dripping onto the bedding, and despite it all Eames just keeps right on gently touching him.

“ _Eames_.” It comes out in a whine. He doesn’t mean it to.

“Oh,” Eames is murmuring, drawing the word out to indecent lengths as he slides out one thumb, bringing a new trickle of heat with it. “You’ll take me again, won’t you? Can you handle that?”

Arthur whimpers, no sense holding back now, rubbing at his own cock. There’s dried come on his skin, and Eames’s hot, flat tongue is licking at the crease of his thigh. “Show me how you want it,” directs Eames, and he pushes a palm between Arthur’s legs and guides them apart even more.

It fast, brutal, Eames’s cock sliding into him again, hard and bare and filling him in long, smooth strokes that don’t last long before he comes. Arthur is trembling and overstimulated when he pulls back out, aching for Eames to soothe the stretch with his tongue, kiss him there as deeply as he does his mouth.

But Eames turns him onto his back and looks at him—just looks at him. Arthur can only imagine the picture he makes, slick thighs fallen open, cock red and rigid in his fist. Eames is flushed all down his neck and chest, sweat gleaming over his skin. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with you,” he breathes, sounding honestly at a loss, and Arthur reaches for him.

He knots his fingers in Eames’s hair, forehead to forehead, and Eames’s eyes are still so sharp, missing nothing. “You make me awful at everything.”

It’s too overwhelming, he can’t say enough, but he needs for Eames to understand. Eames overpowers everyone so easily, exerting a little mental effort to become whoever he wants whether he’s in a dream or not. Arthur, though, is never anyone but himself. A soloist of the highest caliber still only has one voice, but Eames, Eames is multitudes of voices in one. Eames can be anyone and anything, all at the drop of a hat, and Arthur is canny enough to know someone like that can’t ever be trusted or tamed or—

“I don’t care if you’re awful,” Eames whispers, and closes the space between them.

But that isn’t the point because _he_ does and he can’t afford to be awful and Eames is kissing him again and Arthur is holding him close even though he should push him away and tell him to stop because it’s too much and he isn’t enough to handle it.

Arthur comes.

\---

“Was that worth the wait?” Eames asks. There’s an enormous grin on his face and a flimsy portion of sheet is draped over his hip. He looks so young, suddenly, and Arthur would kiss every inch of him if only he could move.

Arthur wrinkles his nose and lets his hand drop to the small of Eames’s back. “Passable.”

“It worked, you know,” Eames tells him, blasé. “I kept a couple tabs on Browning just to be on the safe side and apparently Fischer’s started the company’s dissolution. They drafted an official statement the other day. We should celebrate.”

He imagines it, taking Eames to his favorite café, the one with the orgasmic _fougasse_ , and watching him smoke a self-congratulatory cigar. Letting him buy silly things from local vendors, slapping his hand if he looks a little too contemplative about filching a wallet or a bar of handmade soap just because he can, then getting on his knees for him afterward and sucking him off before they’ve even closed the front door. If it were that easy, he could do it all. “We should.”

Eames’s eyebrows arch slightly, but if the answer surprises him he doesn’t comment. Night presses at the window, curtains making it impossible for Arthur to see the sky.

“That’s just fucking eerie,” Eames eventually mutters when the wind screeches in the distance.

Arthur hesitates. “Do you know what the tramontane is?”

“Sorry, the what?”

“It’s the name of that wind. The chill and the howling, it’s the tramontane. In French, it also means strange, or stranger. Something that comes from beyond.”

“The frightening edge to an otherwise picturesque place.” Eames manages to sound like a very sexy guidebook. Arthur smothers a snicker. “No fucking wonder Van Gogh went mad.”

“I like it here.”

“I can see why.”

Even though he isn’t sure that’s a compliment, Arthur thanks him.

Eames mouths at the side of his neck, unable to keep still and unable to keep quiet any longer. “Do you remember, with the Scrivener job? I had to back out early, but you and Cobb stayed under and you swore you could handle it and finish things fine on your own.”

Arthur does remember. One of the first times they’d worked together after Cobb fled the States. Eames made a fatal miscalculation and Cobb shot him out of the dream before he could bleed to death.

“You,” Eames goes on, hushed, “were hard in your trousers when you slept and I couldn’t stop looking at you. At first I thought you must have found the projection of Scrivener’s wife very beautiful. Then I realized you must have slept with him down there, when I couldn’t.” He has his fingers in Arthur’s hair again, mouth to his jawline. “That was all I thought of until we wrapped things up, how you’d fucked a man while you were under and it wasn’t me.”

“Cobb thought for sure you’d cut and run while we were out.” And he could have, easily. Arthur lets himself be drawn back against Eames’s chest, tossing a glance over his shoulder. “You really won him over with that.”

“I wanted to see if you could pull it off.” Eames’s fingers skim over his ribs, then higher, coming to a stop under Arthur’s chin so he can ease him into a kiss. “Shouldn’t have doubted.”

“Of course not,” Arthur snorts, too tired to sound properly haughty. “We were the best.”

Eames harrumphs and bites the back of his neck, which isn’t punitive at all.

Being the best is a lethal thing and they both know it. There was his uncle, who seemed too superhuman to be real and died because of dreaming; and Cobb, who loved Mal more than anything only to have her ripped away by her own subconscious. But Eames is still there, wrapped around him, warm and comfortable, and the breeze drifts through the half-open window to waft over his skin. It feels nice, Arthur can’t deny it. It could go on feeling nice.

Eames seems to read his mind, nuzzling behind Arthur’s ear. He knows what’s coming, because Eames has a gift for cutting to the chase in a way Arthur never could, not in situations like this. “How long should I plan to stay?”

“That’s all up to you.”

“ _C’est des conneries_ ,” Eames says smoothly.

Arthur turns over to stare at him. The serene grays and blues and hidden colors of Eames’s eyes yield nothing. “I thought you didn’t speak—”

“I pick up the important words.”

Arthur’s stomach knots up. He swallows.

For a long time, they lie there and he tells himself he should leave, get off the bed and clean himself up, maybe wait for Eames to fall asleep so he can pack his things and sneak away from his own house. But Eames is awake and patient and never once stops touching him. His fingers slip over the crest of Arthur’s hip and his lashes sweep in their own kind of kiss against Arthur’s cheek.

Arthur doesn’t look at him, but he doesn’t leave and he doesn’t protest when Eames’s arm slides around his waist. His whole throat feels parched, like his very vocal cords have been somehow sucked dry.

He breathes in.

“What other words do you know?” he asks.

Eames tells him.


End file.
